He returned to Stanford in 2015 as the director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, after nearly a decade on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
[2] He attended the Science, Mathematics, and Computer Science Magnet Program at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, MD, where he was part of a team (including Howard Gobioff) that won a supercomputer in the 1988 SuperQuest competition.
[5] After graduating, Agrawala worked at Microsoft Research for three years, before joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
Agrawala has also developed a system that creates step-by-step assembly instructions for complex machines, using the idea of exploded views to help the user understand the spatial relationships between elements.
His user-centric approach is viewed as having broad applicability in the fields of computer graphics and user interfaces.